ther ashamed of what I was doing, peeped into the
outhouse.

The sight of horror that met my eyes the instant I looked through the
hole is as present to my memory now as if I had beheld it yesterday. I
can hardly write of it at this distance of time without a thrill of the
old terror running through me again to the heart.

The first impression conveyed to me, as I looked in, was of a long,
recumbent object, tinged with a lightish blue color all over, extended
on trestles, and bearing a certain hideous, half-formed resemblance to
the human face and figure. I looked again, and felt certain of it. There
were the prominences of the forehead, nose, and chin, dimly shown as
under a veil--there, the round outline of the chest and the hollow below
it--there, the points of the knees, and the stiff, ghastly, upturned
feet. I looked again, yet more attentively. My eyes got accustomed to
the dim light streaming in through the broken roof, and I satisfied
myself, judging by the great length of the body from head to foot, that
I was looking at the corpse of a man--a corpse that had apparently once
had a sheet spread over it, and that had lain rotting on the trestles
under the open sky long enough for the linen to take the livid,
light-blue tinge of mildew and decay which now covered it.

How long I remained with my eyes fixed on that dread sight of death, on
that tombless, terrible wreck of humanity, poisoning the still air, and
seeming even to stain the faint descending light that disclosed it, I
know not. I remember a dull, distant sound among the trees, as if the
breeze were rising--the slow creeping on of the sound to near the place
where I stood--the noiseless whirling fall of a dead leaf on the corpse
below me, through the gap in the outhouse roof--and the effect of
awakening my energies, of relaxing the heavy strain on my mind, which
even the slight change wrought in the scene I beheld by the falling leaf
produced in me immediately. I descended to the ground, and, sitting down
on the heap of stones, wiped away the thick perspiration which covered
my face, and which I now became aware of for the first time. It was
something more than the hideous spectacle unexpectedly offered to my
eyes which had shaken my nerves as I felt that they were shaken now.
Monkton's prediction that, if we succeeded in discovering his uncle's
body, we should find it unburied, recurred to me the instant I saw the
trestles and their ghastly burden. I f